graded site check-ins next week

Next week is our first of a few graded check-ins on your site. This check-in will accomplish two things: introduce the idea and the audience/community for your site, and demonstrate a hi-rez prototype of some elements of the site.

Next week we will have presentations and you will turn in a report. Your report and your presentation should encompass:

presentation & report

Who is the audience you’re targeting?
— what age/gender/etc are they?
— what do they do, both for a living and also for fun?
— what are their hopes/dreams?
— why are they interested in the things they’re interested in?
— where do they go? (both in real life and online)
— why are they a part of the community(ies) they are a part of?
— what will they gain by visiting your site?
Give three specific examples of real people, complete with photo documentation. For your written report, write a short profile of each person.

Where is the community that already exists around your site’s topic?
— where do they go online?
— where do they go in the real world?
— what do they do when they’re there?
For both locations, please cite three specific examples of each (both virtual and real), explain the motivation your audience/community has in going to those places, their activities once they are there and what you can learn from these things to apply to your site. For the real-world place, please include photo documentation of your visit there: show us your community “in the wild”.

What sites are working in a similar space?
— how are you different?
— what are they doing right?
— what are they doing wrong?
— how do you plan to work with and among those sites?

Bring it all together
With all this information about your audience/community, explain how you will reach them and engage them with your site.
— three specific online examples
— two specific real-world ideas

Your report will be handed in, be sure that every member of your team signs the report.

Slides

Your slides need to cover:

1. Intro to your site with a one-sentence description
2. Your audience defined, with photos
3. Their community defined, with images of them in the locations you identified
4. Other sites in your space
5. A slide for your conclusion

Your slides can contain as much information as you want (though remember: less is often more, you will be talking along with them), but need to cover these five points.

Walkthrough

In addition, you will also present a guided walkthrough of a high-rez prototype of your site. Similar to your work in the Student Communications project, you should craft a mockup of your site in a presentation program of your choosing, with enough detail to get the site idea across, and enough active links to be able to show us some basic functionality.

Presentation specific notes

–Your group’s presentation should not last longer than 10 minutes, that will leave plenty of time for questions from the class and our panelists. If I had to offer a breakdown, that would be probably 7 minutes for the presentation and 3 minutes for the walkthrough. But that’s just an estimate–your time is your own.
–Plan your presentation and walkthrough out in advance, and make sure everyone’s practiced it as well. Rambling doesn’t help anyone.
–Be prepared to answer questions with further detail about your site and your strategy. Prepare also to hear criticism. Being argumentative does not help you in any way, shape, or form. Criticism at this stage is crucial to building a viable site.

Filed under: Homework

lecture links 10-30-09

Powerful copy & paste programming
Custom RSS gadget
(the rest of the Gadgets site is filled with usefull/useless elements you can integrate into your site as well
Google Web Elements
Google Web Elements offers some really great stand-alone elements that offer customizability and simplicity.
Google Friend Connect
Google Friend Connect takes this same copy-and-past idea to the extreme: build fully functional social sites with nothing but copied code.

Filed under: Lecture Links

stuff from today

Here’s a link to the Kutiman “deep dive” page I demoed in class today. Want to see the source? It’s as simple as View>Page Source in Firefox.

And here’s a link to the gibberish example page I built in class. Again, View>Page Source, or Firebug, is your friend.

A word of encouragement: HTML is confusing and CSS is confusing and together they are massively confusing. But I promise you: they make sense, once you understand their internal logic, and every minute you spend frustrated in front of a monitor pays off as the curious logic begins to unfold in front of you. And, once it does, it gets exponentially easier.

Another word of encouragement: The same way you’re not expected to memorize the entire AP style guide, you’re also not expected to memorize a hundred different HTML tags or CSS properties, especially the esoteric ones. You just need to know where to look. First stop? HTML Dog. Second Stop? Google. Third stop? Me.

YOU WILL BE AWESOME.

Filed under: class stuff

Readings, links, + reactions 10-30-09

Two readings today, about local news.
What Newspapers Still Don’t Understand About The Web
The Chicago News Collaborative that’s just been announced.

And one link, at a pretty amazing “deep dive” created by WTTW’s Chicago Tonight:
Facing the Mortgage Crisis. Make sure to dig into the many aspects of this deep, deep site.

Filed under: Readings

Your Work for Next Week

A busy week! Three things:

1) Prepare and test a paper prototype for your group site. This is a group project, so divvy up the work equitably. You need to:
–build the prototype and test it on three actual users of your site (not just your roomates).
–between each user testing session, refine the prototype according to feedback from the previous test.
–document all the testing sessions with video and upload a video of the testing to YouTube.
–write a brief report documenting what you learned from testing and how you’re proceeding with the site concept and design (250 words).

2) Hand-code a deep-dive web page on a subject of your choosing. This page needs to:
–demonstrate your understanding of both basic HTML and CSS.
–show a deep understanding of the subject you’ve chosen.
–as with the example we looked at in class, it should have an introduction and three distinct topic “dives” consisting of multiple links.

3) We’ll have a mid-term check-in on the blog you’ve been keeping since week one. Please make sure it’s up-to-date.

Filed under: Homework

HTML and CSS reference guides

The best reference site that I’ve found to help you with grasping both basic and advanced HTML and CSS is a site called HTML Dog.

It not only includes a number of very good tutorials for people working at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, it also includes a complete reference for both HTML tags and CSS properties, complete with examples of use.

Bookmark it, and use it regularly. The best way to learn this stuff is to simply try it out and look at how other sites do it using a tool like Firebug.

Filed under: class stuff

lecture links 10-23-09

Party like it’s 1994: The original website for Mosaic, the browser that changed everything.

Firebug, the Firefox add-on that lets you dig into site structure and design.

Bespin, the online text editor. Free and great

CSS Zen Garden an incredible resource for downloadable CSS-based site designs. Don’t just take it out of the can, but look at what they’re doing and borrow code to tweak and customize and learn.

Color Picker a very intuitive web app to pick HTML-ready colors.

Filed under: Lecture Links

Your work for next week

Your teams have been assembled. Now you need to get together and start making plans on how to move forward. You have a very important document due next week, an audience & editorial plan for your site. This plan needs to include the following and must be signed by every member of your team:

1. A detailed description of your site. It is OK, at this stage, if the site idea has changed from the initial pitch, either subtly or dramatically. This should lead with a clear one-sentence description, and then build with a paragraph explaining the site & idea in more detail.
2. A clear description of the audience for this site.
3. Interviews with three actual members of the audience/community you’re targeting (new folks, not the same faces), about the space your site is operating in, not the site itself.
4. Informed by these interviews, a discussion of the type of content you would like to do and at least ten specific content ideas.
5. A plan for the integration of tools and media beyond simple text/blogging.
6. A basic plan for marketing your site: How do you connect with the communities that are already out there?
7. An overall plan for the equal distribution of labor: How will you share the reporting work? The data entry? The coding? The images/video/audio? The marketing?

Please post your reports here, but also bring in a hard copy that–everybody now–has been signed by every member of your group

Filed under: Homework

readings, links, + reactions 10-23-09

In class next week, we’ll be getting our hands dirty with code. Here are two good reasons why:
Why Journalists Should Learn to Code
Be Not Afraid: Journalists Should Learn Code

Additionally, we will start our weekly discussion of topics in online journalism. We’ll talk about social media and journalism next week. Please read this story: NPR to Social Media: Bring It On (be sure to click through on the links in the article as well).
And visit these three Twitter accounts: LA Times Fires | Planet Money | Colonel Tribune

POST REACTIONS IN THIS THREAD!!!

Filed under: Readings

What’s a persona?

It is always easier to create a site when you’re creating it for someone.

For many developers, this means creating a few personas, fictional stand-ins for the many real people you speak to when developing the site. These stands-ins need to have enough reality behind them to push your ideas toward real people, instead of stereotypes. As a result, your personas should have:

Names
Genders
Relationships (or lack thereof)
Incomes/Jobs
Education
Interests/Hobbies
Attitudes towards technology
A reason for coming to your site/goal to achieve there

Please think of three different personas that are rooted in reality (can and should base them on interviews you conducted—they can be amalgams of multiple people, if there are through-lines that connect them. They should have varying levels of computer literacy, and varying interest in the topic your site is built around. Think in terms of a “super user” a “casual user” etc.

For more about personas, you can read here and here

Filed under: Homework